Finding Queen Calafia

4. The Magic Feather

By the next morning, I had forgotten much of what Uncle Rupert had told me about the mythical Queen of California, but I had not forgotten about the miraculous feather. In the clear light of the morning, fairy tales about women warriors and griffins seemed silly. Anyway, I was anxious to resume my exploring with my brother and cousins. I wanted to see the feather again but I was eleven and easily distracted; the rare and mysterious objects of the world had not yet become the center of my dreams or my work.

Vacation at Albion Ranch promised a fresh discovery each day. As children, nothing was so very important to us as the freedom to run under the dappled light of the mighty, spreading oaks, to hide in the pygmy redwood forest, to track fox and bobcats by following small piles of scat, to swim in the natural pools – not even the discovery of a magic feather. By late afternoon, all that would change.

The sun wasn't even up yet when my cousins George and Simon called out to me from outside the screened window of the room where I was sleeping. "Hey! Meriwether! Look what Simon caught!" Meriwether was a nickname given to me by Simon, owing to my generally solemn disposition. My best defense was to ignore it.

"What time is it?" I asked, pulling the curtains aside. "If you wake my mother, don't say I didn't warn you."

Simon was standing under the oak holding a large gopher snake. It had coiled itself around his thin arm for warmth and the position of its head near his own gave the impression of a ventriloquist's dummy. Its tongue darted in and out, in and out, smelling the air for food and or danger.

"Where did you get that?" I asked, a little jealous that he'd been the one to catch the first snake. Rattlesnakes, of course, were an ever present threat at Albion Ranch, and Uncle Rupert insisted that each of us be able to distinguish between a gopher snake and rattlesnake by the shape of its head. Garter snakes and the infrequent King snakes were a prize find. Simon was the only one among us who was truly unafraid of handling the snakes. The rest of us pretended

"Hurry up!" Simon said. "I can't stand here all day."

I told my mother, who was still in bed, that I was going out to explore. She was no doubt sleeping off too much champagne and had no idea what time it was. She mumbled something that sounded like permission and rolled over. I threw on the same clothes I'd worn the day before, grabbed my boots and a small towel for drying off and shot out the door.

The day was already warm, even though "rosy-fingered dawn" – a favorite expression of my mother's from The Odyssey – was beginning to reach across a lilac sky. A hawk reeled and dove over the field where the cattle grazed. On such a perfect day, I felt I was ready for anything.

Bill, Simon, George and I made a stealthy raid on the kitchen and filled a small sack with fresh bread and dried fruit from the pantry. We picked up four of the ranch hands' children along the way, and soon our little party of explorers had grown to eight. The cicadas were already singing brightly by the time we arrived at the dirt road that followed the creek. A solitary milk cow stood forlornly at the cattle grate, sleepily guarding the entrance to a fairy tale forest. Simon, still carrying the gopher snake, tried to spook the cow with the, but she was either uninterested or too wise to care.

"Brute," teased George.

"Brutus," Simon corrected.

Simon let the snake go and it slithered off down the bank.

The second largest swimming hole on the creek at Albion Ranch we called the Mirror Pool. Bill gave it the name when he was six years old, and it stuck. Small patches of blue sky were visible through the heavy tree cover that was reflected on the quicksilver surface of the deep, quiet water. Some bushwhacking was required to clear a path through the brambles and vines at the start of every summer, resulting in at least one case of poison oak and an encounter or two with stinging nettle, which was unavoidable because there were thickets of it. Uncle Rupert actually boiled and drank it as tea, which both horrified and impressed us all.